Does the world need difference?
It is a weird question, I know. However, I could not help to think about monotony and chaos. Funnily, I started to think about this when I was doing some self-reflection.
On my way home, I was running through some job interview questions since one can never be too prepared. The question I failed to answer properly was “how would you describe yourself?”. Then I started to mentally list everything I consider to be me.
The question which that train of thought left me was what part of me is me. Do I need to describe my personality or talents? What even is personality in the first place? These questions can be a long and confusing article on its own and I have no intention of focusing on that today. Instead, TedEd has a short summarisation video.
Since that train of thought was a never-ending rabbit hole, I attempted something different. Tackle that question from the other open end if you will. Therefore I asked myself what separates me from everyone else. What makes me me in comparison to others? I know that that kind of question sounds a tad pretentious but just bear with me.
My mind led me down a rather confusing path but that is nothing new at this point. At that subway station, a thought just popped up. Vaguely, I just thought to myself that I am just different from everyone else and that makes me me. As much as I hate it, in a crowd, I stick out like a sore thumb. Quite literally. Sadly, it is pretty easy to pick me out of a crowd whether it’s because of the way I dress, behave or genetically am.
A quick scientific side note. Genetically speaking, we share up to 99% of genetic information. We are different by 1% but don’t let that small percentage fool you because if you should look around in a crowd, it’s fairly obvious that no two people are alike. No two people can be 100% identical since it is even possible to tell apart identical twins and they are supposed to be the genetically the most identical pair of people.
Photo by kristamonique (Pixbay)
Long story short, everyone is unique. However, we are still humans, which just means that we like to fit in no matter how genetically unique we are. The point I was trying to make to myself was that I am fully capable to blend into the crowd but choose not to by changing small differences. By doing the most trivial things differently and that is where my pretend job interview ended and where my mind began wandering.
My mind just kept up thinking of reasons why I prefer to stick out rather than blend in. Another factor I thought of was that I am rather an antisocial person and sometimes prefer to be in places with the least amount of people. By sticking out and doing things differently, I defensively made sure that I am not like everyone else and get caught up in a crowd as crowds makes me rather anxious.
This group behaviour thought was interesting since I started to wonder about pushing fitting into an extreme or in other words make everyone identical to one another. What would we as a society lose if we lose individuality?
There are many dystopian novels that depict how that kind of world would look like and how people would behave. However, the thing about dystopian novels as well as thought experiments is that they cannot be up to 100% accurate. Besides it is no secret that human behaviour is hard to predict much less predicting it accurately so there is no telling how we would react as a society to monotone identicalness. Will it drive us crazy? Will we actually enjoy the simplicity of monotony? There are also so many other factors besides human behaviour that need to be considered. For example the circumstances of the loss of individuality. Was it forced upon society or was it a unanimous decision? Will the loss of individuality lead to a revolution? Will the loss of individuality lead to the world working together as one?
Let’s assume that we all agreed to identicalness. Don’t worry, that will never happen. Now we are living in a world where everyone is wearing the same thing, living in identical homes, looking similar and doing synchronised activities every day. What kind of a world would that be? A bit mundane world in my opinion even though I would not mind wearing the same outfit or similar variants of the same outfit every day as long as it is chic and comfortable. Saves time in the morning and if everyone is following this similar outfit trend then nobody will be judged for wearing the same outfit every day but that is just me and other people can have a completely different opinion on this subject.
However completely identicalness is not completely bad because as a race we managed to fine-tune the art of showing off using clothes and behaviour. Would it be that bad of an idea to get rid of that divide we implemented upon us? If we should all be mere clones of each other no one would be better than the other and we all would be one.
That idea just leaves us with the question of how that kind of society could function. If there is no one better than the other, there would be no leader. If there are no leaders would we even manage to organise ourselves? The world has seven billion people after all and the coordination of all seven billion people is quite the feat to say the very least.
Since we have established complete identicalness is hard to achieve, how about we take a look at the other side of the story? What if we are all unique?
There is no one person like the other. Well, there is no dystopian novel one can compare that scenario to or my dystopian novel knowledge is lacking. Either way, a world where everyone is completely unique and there is no one that would share a trait with another. How would that kind of world look like?
Currently, we live in a world where we are in between individuality and uniformity. If we should take away the uniformity out of the balanced equation then there is no saying what could be possible.
If there will be complete chaos or colourfulness. There is no saying that the uniform-less world is only limited by our imagination and what it could think of. Frankly, I thought long and hard about this kind of world and every ‘draft’ is different from the other. No two world with complete individuality is like the other.
However, one thing I could think of which was identical in all the worlds was the relatability of human beings if no two human beings share common traits, hobbies, features, etc. For one, I believe that it is impossible for that kind of world to exist since there are no seven billion different hobbies, features, traits, etc for everyone. There is bound to be some overlaps in this extremely unique world.
However, if we can imagine a world with no trait sharing humans then there is still be the problem of relatability. As part of a society, we always prefer to talk to the people with who we have something in common with. Someone who will understand everything one is gushing about. If we are truly interested we would even talk to the people we have nothing in common with because we want to know how the others live like however that kind of conversation never last long in my experience and believe me when I say I have tried.
Nevertheless, in a world where no one shares the same feature, it would be quite interesting to see how we would communicate since everyone is unique, which in turn would mean that we wouldn’t even speak the same language. At least that was the case in one of the worlds I imagined.
Therefore if we should speak the same language and if we should be interested in every single person’s life of every single person we would meet (which is quite frankly a lot of people) then it would be a lot of information to take in and a whole lot more information to keep in mind.
This just raises the question of if we would even be a society if we are all different? Is something tying us together as a society?
Facing questions like that, it is best to start with the definition of society. Funnily, society is that kind of word where one knows what it means but could never define it. Since I couldn’t define society, I decided to let the dictionary do it. Society is ‘the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.’ This definition is interesting since this just leaves me with one of the initial questions I had, would there be complete chaos if we are completely different.
Let’s assume that we are ordered even though none of us is alike. This just leaves the question of what is a community. According to the dictionary, a community is ‘a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common’, which in the case of a no attitude nor characteristic sharing world is impossible.
With that general definition of community, it is obvious that we can’t be a community and live in a society without sharing traits or interests. That kind of world would be kind of lonely considering that we are social creatures. However one should never worry too much since the world is a fine balance of everything and it rarely tips to an extreme since it requires people to work and stay together which they rarely do.
Besides from a mathematical standpoint it is as mentioned impossible to be completely different. I know the mathematician who said this quote meant it in relation to the Ramsey theory (an interesting theory, which leads to many other interesting topics which I sadly can’t cover today) however I find that quote in this situation quite fitting as well. Theodore Motzkin once said that “while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible.”
Therefore we should not fear that we will be one big happy community where everyone is identical or is extremely individualistic where we can barely talk to each other any time soon since international extremes is highly unlikely.
As for my initial question, there is no saying what we are if we are all different or identical or who we are going to be if that unlikely situation will happen. All we can do is speculate even though it’s inaccurate but at least it’s fun.